Dr. Jai Raj Nair
Professor - IT
“The advantage of a PGDM in E-business lies in unique career paths and earning power. There is no doubt that a graduate with PGDM in E-Business will be much better suited and therefore in much more demand than the regular PGDM graduates given the rapid pace at which technology is seeping into our daily lives, causing digital disruptions in all walks of life.”
IBM coined the term ‘E-business’ and The Gartner Group embellished it to mean the ‘continuous optimization of a firm’s business activities through digital technologies’. Traditionally, a CIO’s role has been to apply technology for optimizing processes, reducing risks, and better running the existing business. In other words, the role was all about fitting technology to existing business requirements.
However, the traditional CIO (Chief Information Officer) has now transmogrified to a CDO (Chief Digital Officer), whose role is more avant-garde, more strategic and focusing on the application technology to reimagine and reinvent the core business itself. Thus, it can be seen that there is tremendous need for effective business managers who can marry technology with business. Indeed, knowing how to manage IT (Information technology) can make one a better IT professional and knowing how to use IT to manage makes one a better manager.
Management & Technology
Traditionally, B-Schools in India have been offering a specialization in “Systems” that hovers around technical aspects such as programming, database concepts, computer networks, data structures and algorithms, analytics etc. The problem with such a specialization is that the curriculum usually does not include the application of these concepts to business practices and hence, most students, especially from the non-technical background, find it difficult to grasp these concepts and hence, they end up developing technology-phobia, which is an anathema for businesses of the modern world. Nevertheless, by the time they come to the end of their B-school life, they understand business quite well, they may or may not understand technology per se, but more often than not, when it comes to fusing technology with management they usually turn out to be croppers.
As mentioned by Dr. Omkar Rai, Director General, Software Technology Park of India (STPI), speaking at the 15th India Innovation Summit, 2019 organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in Bengaluru, the global software product industry is currently valued at $511 billion, of which India’s share is $8.1 billion but the objective is to take India to $80-90 billion by 2025. If India is not to be overtaken by rivals like China and continue maintaining its envious position in the global IT/ITES Industry, a radical change in the B-school curriculum becomes necessary.
Welingkar Institute of Management Development & Research, one of the most sagacious B-schools in India, sensed this latent niche and came out with an innovative PGDM Course in E-business, way back in 2008. The pioneers, who envisaged this course, saw the huge gap and latched on to the opportunity by offering this course. The word ‘digital’ has become a buzzword today and organizations are frantically scouting for business managers who can lead digital transformation initiatives in their organizations. Thus, a course that was conceived almost 12 years ago has become all the more relevant in today’s business environment.
The PGDM E-Business Program
As one of the pioneering programs in India, the PGDM E-Business program focuses on E-commerce, digital transformation and the technology sector. As mentioned earlier, the program was conceived based on the perceived need of the industry, to nurture managers and leaders who can bring together business and technology knowledge, along with domain and vertical skills. The prevalent ‘Systems’ specialization programs are quite inadequate for equipping a person with functional domain knowledge (Finance, Marketing etc.) or with industrial vertical knowledge and skills (e.g. Retail, Telecom, E-Commerce etc.). The PGDM E-Business program fills these gaps by allowing a student to not only learn all the PGDM core courses, but also to learn a wide range of technology courses as well as functional specializations (Marketing/Finance/HR/Operations) and industry verticals (Banking, Retail, E-Commerce etc.), depending on his area of further interest.
The major distinguishing feature of this unique inventive program is that the curriculum provides insights into digital convergence. It encourages students to explore how various digital technologies and platforms can be leveraged in an innovative manner to help drive business results through better engagement with customers, innovative products and services, innovative customer experiences (UX/CX) and innovative business models. This unique program architecture has given an added edge to the program that can be gauged from the consistent acceptance by the industry over the years in terms of placements in best-of-breed IT companies year-on-year.
In summary, PGDM in E-business provides students with a thorough understanding of amalgamating technology into a business to help it grow and succeed. Of course, such students won’t be physically developing the technology, but they will be groomed to understand the relevant issues while blending technology with business processes. Thus, by the time they become graduates they would have developed solid critical /analytical thinking skills and also design/innovative/integrative thinking skills, that are highly sought-after and non-negotiable skills in the modern world of business. The advantage of a PGDM in E-business lies in unique career paths and earning power. There is no doubt that a graduate with PGDM in E-Business will be much better suited and therefore in much more demand than the regular PGDM graduates given the rapid pace at which technology is seeping into our daily lives, causing digital disruptions in all walks of life.
